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Originally Posted by GOZR
Asheshouse You are dreaming right ?.. English beaten fled away to their island leaving France alone versus German advanced ground power .. man .. 
Anyway lets go foward.. |
Come on GOZR -- lets have some facts, and we can all learn a bit, including me.
From the figures posted it seems that the RAF losses were proportionately larger than those of the Armee de l'Air. Why was that?
Why was such a large proportion of the French Air Force still intact at the end of the battle? In fact the French had more aircraft available at the end than at the beginning!
It appears to me -- from limited reading -- that the French military leaders were psychologically beaten before the forces on the ground were. Large parts of the air force were withdrawn to North Africa and Syria, where subsequently they came into conflict with the British forces!! There also seems to have been poor cooperation between allied airforces generally and the ground troops, compared with what the german forces were able to achieve.
Regarding the miraculous fighting retreat from Dunkirk, this was only possible in part due to the successful rear guard actions a large part of which was carried out by the French forces in the area. On the other hand the air cover over Dunkirk was almost entirely left to the RAF as far as I know.
The biggest failure of the BoF seems to have been that of the French Government who were too ready to accept defeat rather than to fight on.
Churchill's refusal to sue for peace after the withdrawal from France was a major turning point, resulting in BoB, and it was only after BoB that the USA realised that they had a potential winner to back.